Greetings all!! I haven't blogged anything in a very long time, and for that I apologize. You see, when last we left me...I was happy, living in beautiful, warm California...enjoying life as much as I ever had. Funny thing that happens when you're with someone in the medical profession, they have to do internships and residencies for like 15 years after they pay six figures for the privilege of getting their degree. So you end up moving all over the country (and maybe even Canada!) while they're basically paid less than minimum wage and you never ever see them. This sort of vagabond lifestyle leads you to such exotic locales as my current home: Long Island.

So here we are, cold, miserable, and I haven't left my house in like 6 days. What better time to fire up the old blogging URL and wax poetic about our favorite hockey team, the Sabres.

First off, you need to go watch this or else the theme is going to be lost on you. If you haven't seen it, you can probably still follow along...but you should watch that video anyway because it's all sorts of brilliant and funny.

I want to stick around the spring of hope that we suddenly stumbled upon these last couple weeks. I really do. There’s nothing I want more than to wait out this short week between games, watch the Bills play the Dolphins and hold onto this rare, stubborn feeling for another week or two. Our Bills are not mathematically eliminated. The task is not impossible. Maybe the current state-of-things-and-numbers should be enough to keep us all around the water cooler with more than a little bit of optimism. The Bills are still in the mix! It’s November! Any Given Sunday! Fucking hell. We’ve seen this movie before, and no matter how many times you tell yourself that things can’t go down like this every fucking time, it just doesn’t matter. There's always one thing or another that creeps into frame and ensures that success will remain just out of reach. We knew this was coming, I suppose, but it hurts just as much. Others will break down what went wrong yesterday, and you can go read them. I’m just too fucking sad today and can’t find much energy to make jokes while telling you what you already know about the Chiefs win in Orchard Park. Watching Bills football has been fun this year, despite where we’re at right now. And it will probably be fun over the course of the next few weeks, and the team may even tease a little more optimism out of our eager tweeting fingers and blogging hands. This is a team that is incredibly enjoyable to watch, regardless of the persisting faults in areas here (the offensive line) and there (the other side of the offensive line). It’s a team built on immense talent, a top tier defense, and a real apparent desire of players to win in and for Buffalo. Even so, watching Bills football has been fucking maddening this year. And it will most assuredly be maddening right through Week 17. Set against a roster with overflowing talent and skill and desire and sheer likeability, the broader Buffalo Bills franchise has been all-too-willing to forfeit that abundance of quality through a persistent lack of quality amongst the men really in charge. Compounding the unavoidable mistakes inherent in sport and the physics of its execution are the unacceptable decisions of a Head Coach deserving nothing more or less than the label of “coward.” We have at our disposal, as consumers of this particular entertainment product, honest-to-God sports heroes playing for our Buffalo Bills. Heroes because of their persisting desire to succeed for us despite the significant bodily risks attendant that endeavor, but even more so for what they have been able to accomplish in spite of the cowardice of their Head Coach. Catching a football is not always an easy task. Throwing a ball on a dime 30 yards down the field is hard. Blocking and running and tackling and working on a football field, all the while trying to keep your body intact for fear of pain and financial heartbreak and the scorn of fans quick to label you weak should you get hurt too often … all of this is hard. Which isn’t to say that the demands of being a Head Coach in the NFL are not hard. But let’s not fucking kid ourselves. Doug Marrone owes his players – these men who have risked everything while Marrone stands on the sidelines adorned in shitty khakis and a vacant face – far more than the cowardice he has displayed. It’s about time we stop pretending that there’s all that much grey area in terms of assessing the quality of decisions being made by the Head Coach of the Buffalo Bills. Our guys are out there killing themselves to win for us, playing the most dangerous professional sport on earth. The least we can do as we start the long process of giving up whatever hope we allowed ourselves is stand up and start demanding a Head Coach that honors these players in some discernible way. Doug Marrone simply hasn't.

It’s taken me a while to get back my optimism. I started the season with real hope for making the playoffs. Not a lot. But a little goes a long way.

Then came Kyle Orton.

I’ve admitted I was opposed to this switch when it happened. It really wasn’t so much about who was the better quarterback. It was about the kind of the season we were going to see. A passer with the skill set and build of E.J. Manuel is something we’ve never seen before. A journeyman with iffy accuracy and no mobility? I felt like I could script the rest of the year from memory.

Three wins and one Patriots game later, it’s… debatable. No one will argue with the record, obviously, but no one’s rushing to buy a jersey either. Defense and special teams have been the biggest reason this team is 5-3. Orton has been (Dear God, why do I have to write this again?) as good as he’s needed to be and nothing more. At one point against the Jets, the Bills had six drives start within 50 yards of the goal line. Only one of them resulted in a touchdown. Before the game-winning TD at home against Minnesota, the Bills’ scored a field goal with 4 minutes left in the 2nd quarter. Then nothing, until that last drive. Against the Vikings.

But here is where I’ll admit I was wrong. Orton’s throws to Hogan and Watkins could not have been completed by E.J. Not right now. Since benching Manuel, they’ve gone from treading water to a playoff push. It’s undeniable. It was the right move. Now comes the hard part.

There are only two teams left in the Bills' remaining eight games that don’t have a realistic shot at making the playoffs. Of the playoff contenders, three have Super Bowl MVP quarterbacks. If the Bills are for real, they need a win this Sunday against Kansas City. It’s as simple as that. The Chiefs have legit wins against the Chargers and whoever that was wearing the Patriots’ jerseys a few weeks back. But their other three came against the Rams, Dolphins, and Jets. And no one accidentally thought of Alex Smith when I mentioned the MVPs. The Bills can win this game.

Our defense is for real. Sammy Watkins is a highlight reel waiting to happen. And that crowd. OH, that crowd. Bills fans haven’t had a game to go to in three weeks and the team has a legit chance to go 6-3 for the first time since Flutie Flakes were a thing. The Ralph might bear a striking resemblance to the USO show in Apocalypse Now by the time this game kicks off. I can't wait.

I’ve had recaps partially written the last few weeks. I promise. But then Wednesday would predictably roll around, too much of the post would be left to do, Bradley Gelber would incite unrelated rage in one way or another, my kid would poop himself, my wife would be justifiably mad at me for one thing or another, and I would give up. If I had any real sense that those recaps would have been good, or that anyone truly missed them, I would apologize. I do not, and you have not. Alas. Maybe you just come here for the podcasts, which is totally understandable as they are awesome, but even that proved too difficult this week after Scizz and my effort at a Halloween evening recording was ultimately unusable – a weird electronic distortion of our otherwise silky smooth voices, creating something way too close to the sound created by the device that creepy motherfuckers use on the phone whilst stalking/engaging in international espionage/playing pranks on their teachers/murdering teenagers in some suburban wasteland of the late 90s. We're trying again soon.As for my writing, I got a new job a few weeks back, and before that I was steadily seeking employment with a level of anxiety that made spending too much time writing here seem foolish at best and, at worst, unconscionably dismissive of my duties as bringer-of-bacon to the homestead. All of which is to say that while this little internet playground we have here at DGWU Sports has been left largely free of the heavy tread of my #hotsportstake gait, it is all for very good reasons. But while I have a few moments in between assignments at the new gig, let’s touch on a few of the things that I would have posted about previously but for my career, marriage, kid, and intoxication.